


Pinch Drunk

by kayliemalinza



Series: Alcohol Annals [1]
Category: Torchwood
Genre: BDSM, Humor, Multi, alien sex pollen, dodgy aliens, femmedom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-10-08
Updated: 2008-10-08
Packaged: 2017-10-27 06:11:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/292493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kayliemalinza/pseuds/kayliemalinza
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the aftermath of a 20-hour pursuit of a pack of masochistic panda bears, the team discover something's up with Jack. He isn't drunk, exactly, but he's still gonna be fun to mess with.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pinch Drunk

**Author's Note:**

> Teamfic, set before Season One.

It takes them a while to notice that Jack is drunk. In their defense, Owen thinks, he isn't _acting_ drunk. Tired, maybe, eyes a little bloodshot, but they've spent the past 20 hours chasing a pack of masochistic panda bears so everyone looks like that. Not to mention, Suzie sprained her ankle and is lurching around like a supermodel Frankenstein so no one's paying much attention to whether or not Jack is a little unsteady on his feet. And, as stated earlier, _masochistic pandas_. Owen, for one, doesn't give a damn about anything else right now.

Owen has his computer hooked up to read-outs from the vault cells so he can study the psychology of the masochistic pandas because he has a theory. Anyone who likes pain, he asserts, must be an idiot. Letting Rachel Gibson spank him with a ruler in the final year of med school doesn't count because he was temporarily insane on account of her being blonde and really good at the sexy school teacher thing. And Christ, she had nice legs. Owen still thinks about them while pulling his pud, thinks about how the insides of her thighs flared out just slightly beneath the hem of her favorite blue skirt. He should really look her up sometime.

Jack comes up behind Owen and leans against his desk, arms crossed. The leaning thing isn't new—Owen sometimes suspects that Jack paused to lean against his mother's labia on his way out, and maybe he was born with that irritating grin as well—but Jack's pupils are slightly dilated and it takes him a few tries to cross his arms (proprioception, the sense of the position of one's body parts relative to each other, is diminished while drunk.) This is pretty damning evidence and Owen feels something of a git for blowing Tosh off when she pulled him and Suzie aside after they got back and said she thought Jack was drunk. Wait, no, he's not a git, because Tosh's only evidence was that Jack let Owen drive and so, obviously, he was somehow impaired. That's ridiculous. Jack lets Owen drive all the time. In fact, he doesn't need to _let_ Owen drive at all. Owen drives the SUV when he damn well wants to. Tosh can't, though. Tosh is not allowed to drive the SUV. Owen is working on getting Jack to write a memo and sign it, just to make everything official. He'd forbid Suzie from driving, too, but the way her eyes narrow when she runs a red light is really hot.

Tosh is onto something with the Drunk Jack thing, though, and now Owen's wondering when Jack _got_ drunk. If he's really honest with himself, Jack was a little wobbly yesterday, back when they were hoping the Rift flare didn't mean anything and Owen's psyche had not yet been scarred with the idea of masochistic pandas. And if that's true, why is he still drunk? Was Jack taking pulls from a flask mid-chase? Does he have access to an alien inebriant that was long lasting and didn't cause hangovers? If so, why hasn't Owen been informed of this? It's his duty as a medical doctor to investigate it, surely, and Jack is a selfish bastard.

Owen is just wondering if he can get away with 'accidentally' shoving Jack to the floor when Jack leans forward and asks, "Are the readings from the cells giving you any idea as to what caused their altered mental state?"

Owen glances at the CCTV footage playing on his monitor and grimaces. It's charitable to call these things pandas. Pandas are cute. These things have nostril-fingers and are not cute. "No idea," he says. "Near as I can tell, they're just perverts." And idiots, he adds silently, then points at the leftmost cell with his biro. "They've figured out where the cameras are." The not-panda in that cell is watching back, tapping its opposable nostrils against each other threateningly.

"Yeah, they seem to have a talent for knowing that they're being watched," Jack muses. His left hand wavers out to balance himself. It's a slight movement, but Jack Harkness is never unsteady, hasn't been once in all the months that Owen's known him.

"It would've made our lives a hell of a lot easier if they didn't," Owen grumbles. The not-pandas, smarter than Owen's theory accounts for, figured out immediately that Torchwood was observing them via the surveillance cameras and disappeared into the red light district. Every time Torchwood or the police tries to put cameras in the red light district they're destroyed by the residents, so Team Torchwood had to go in on foot. The not-pandas (damned of-average intelligence bastards!) had picked them out soon enough, so Jack decided to bring in the only agent the not-pandas hadn't seen yet to go undercover and lure the perverts in with what they wanted most: pain.

Tosh's shoes, as it turns out, are practical after all.

"Don't see how anyone could think you were a dominatrix with that stunned bunny look," Owen had said.

"Shut up," Tosh shot back, and dug her stiletto more deeply into the quivering mound of not-panda flesh.

It's been three hours since then and even from across the Hub, Owen can tell her face is still red. That is objectively hilarious, he thinks, and no-one can convince him otherwise.

"I've found something!" Suzie yells out. She's limping down from the conference room holding a file folder. "You know the warehouse where we tracked the pandas from?" she asks, pulling papers from the file with long, articulated sweeps of her arm as she comes up. Owen loves her arms, thinks they might be his fifth favorite part of her. The first three are his favorite parts of any woman, and the fourth is Suzie's ankle, which recently nudged ahead due to Owen having a good excuse to get his fingers on it for a while. Sprained ankles need to be wrapped just so, even if that means re-doing the bandage three or four times. And everyone knows that kissing a boo-boo makes it better.

"Let's not call them pandas anymore," Owen says. "Pandas are supposed to be cute. Those," he points at the CCTV footage again, "Are not cute."

Suzie blinks at him. Jack turns to the screen and says, "I dunno, I think they're kinda cute. Especially the one with white ears."

"That one's humping the wall," Owen says.

"Personality counts for a lot," says Jack, and winks.

Tosh, who wandered over when Suzie came down, looks like she wants to wander away again. Owen wonders if she was born with eyes that round or if she exists in a perpetual state of shock. Around this lot, he doesn't blame her. "You're a sick man, Harkness," Owen says, but not without affection.

Suzie flips coolly through the file folder, lips pursed in a way that goes right to Owen's prick. He blames Rachel Gibson for that, again; she was very, very good at the sexy school teacher thing.

"The warehouse is located next to an open field where we first noticed Rift activity before those things made themselves known," Suzie says, handing out copies of a map.

Jack concentrates a bit too hard on taking the print-out from Suzie's hand. Owen may be imagining that Suzie pulls it out of reach a few times, but considering the odd little smirk on her face he thinks maybe not. Jack finally succeeds in grabbing the map and frowns at it. "We know this already," he says. "I went there right after we logged the Rift activity, but I didn't see anything to suggest where these creatures came from or why they're acting this way."

"You didn't see it because it's invisible," Suzie says excitedly.

"Invisible?" asks Tosh. "How?"

"Invisible _what_?" Owen says. "Spaceship? Perverto-machine?"

"Perverto-machine?" Tosh asks.

'That was a joke," says Owen.

"Oh," says Tosh, and hides her returning blush behind the paper.

Jack is still staring in consternation at the paper, which proves to Owen more than anything that Jack is drunk. No sober man would pass up the opportunity to discuss an invisible perverto-machine.

Suzie's doe-eyes are going to roll right out of her head. "Invisible psychotropic gas," she says. "An environmentalist group tested the soil in that field earlier today and found chemicals in the soil that they believe were absorbed from the air sometime yesterday, which would fit the timeline." She passes out another set of papers and says, "New Boy cribbed the initial report from their private server."

"Oh, did he," Tosh says, smiling proudly. Owen had seen Tosh and New Boy snuggled up in the glow of a computer screen but he figured they were sleeping together, not trading hacking tips. Then again, for two such pathetic geeks, that might amount to the same thing.

"How did New Boy even know where to look?" Owen asks, glancing at the report. The chemical formula is definitely not something he's ever seen on Earth, but parts of it look very familiar.

Suzie shrugs. "He had a good hunch," she says. "I think we should keep him."

"I've already decided to keep him," Jack says crankily. "That's why I _hired_ him. And he has a name." Owen would point out that there's several other reasons why Jack hired New Boy—the rest of the team is running a betting pool on it, actually—but he's not going to fault a man for that, although he will heartily fault him for his choice of targets.

"His name is Ianto," Tosh adds.

"Thanks, Tosh," says Owen. "I didn't know that, because I'm a blathering idiot."

"There's hope, Owen; you hit that one right on the button," Suzie says archly before Tosh's expression can proceed all the way to 'crestfallen.'

Owen grins at her. Feisty is good. Rachel Gibson had been feisty, if he remembered right.

"Settle down kids," Jack says absent-mindedly, still staring at the report like it's rocket science.

"Are you sure this chemical compound is what's making the pandas act this way?" Tosh asks.

"We've decided not to call them pandas anymore," says Owen.

Suzie turns slightly away from Owen to face Tosh. This is obviously a dismissive gesture, but Owen doesn't mind because it gives him a good view of the line of her back, dipping inwards just above her arse. "I ran the chemical formula through an analysis program," she says. "The program couldn't predict everything, but the formula definitely impacts the production of endorphins, leading to an irregular response to pain. There would also be some side effects, especially in humans, such as a diminished capacity for clear reasoning, slower reflexes and dilation of the pupils. Jack, are you drunk?"

Jack's head snaps up. "Of—of course not!" he says, eyes skittering around nervously.

"Of course not," Suzie repeats warmly, nodding. "That's because you don't drink, right? You haven't had any alcohol in the past few days. But you were in that field," she says, then darts out a hand to pinch Jack's arm. Hard.

Jack lets out a noise that could be briefly transcribed as "Ow!" but that wouldn't relate all the nuances of it, especially how it sounds half-way like a moan and how his cheeks go pink. The way his arm quivers in Suzie's grasp without attempting to move away is interesting, too.

"Ah ha," says Owen in his best the-doctor-has-a-diagnosis voice. "Tosh, you'd better get your shoes out again."

Tosh goes bright red and shakes her head, but Owen is sure that her quick, erratic glances at Jack mean something. He's not entirely sure what they mean, yet, but Owen has gotten yelled at by Tosh enough times for the inherent hilarity of it (really, _Tosh_. Dependable, mousy geek-girl Tosh scolding him. How ridiculous can you get?) to wear off a bit, letting him notice that her body language transforms in those moments and she doesn't seem self-conscious at all. Owen just has that effect on people. He's a miracle worker.

"My computer can—" Tosh falters for a moment. "I can synthesize an antidote if I have a sample of the chemical," she says. "It'd only take a few minutes."

"We can get that from the soil in the field, just like the environmental group did," says Suzie. "We just need to send someone over to do that. Think that's a good idea, Boss?" she asks, then twists the red flesh between her fingers

Jack is close to hyperventilating. "Yes," he gasps. "Send—someone...."

"I'm staying right here," says Owen, and leans back with a grin.

"I'll do it," blurts Tosh, and is already running for the door.

Suzie doesn't say anything. She just digs her nails into Jack's skin, eyes lit up with something close to joy.


End file.
